At this late date, it’s difficult to find something new or fresh to say about “What we did during Covid lockdown,” as so many other filmmakers chose to use that time planning and even filming such stories.

But the French filmmaker Olivier Assayas (“Non-Fiction,”“Personal Shopper,” Wasp Network”) insisted on making a distinctly French, decidedly his own statement on that “Suspended Time,” so here we are.

Assayas has made a few attempts to broaden his palette from the chatty, dry, “French Woody Allen romances” without the laughs that has been his brand. Not here, mind you. He’s made a scenic, talkative and thinly (VERY thinly) charming parody of French Films Made for Export, taking care to not miss a trope or cliche of such films.

Four people hunker down in the family country house in the Chevreuse Valley outside of Paris, adjacent to an even bigger abandoned country estate. A couple are divorced, and a third is going through a divorce.

Two brothers inherited this place, and one narrates the story of growing up here in long, floral-illustrated passages that open the film. Paul (Vincent Magaigne) is a filmmaker. Etienne (Mischa Lescot) is a popular rock historian for French radio.

Paul is a germophobic writer-director frustrated by his lack of progress in realizing his dream — “a period piece starring Kristen Stewart” starring as “a Portuguese nun.” He makes mention of having made the film “Irma Vep.” Assayas made that movie about making movies back in the ’90s, which he remade as a streaming series in 2022 with Alicia Vikander and…Vincent Magaigne.

Covid has pushed Paul into a living-together situation with taller, younger and prettier filmmaker Morgane (Nine d’Urso), who has a “Madame Bovary” documentary she’s been offered.

Etienne is the sibling going through a divorce, an avid cook who is increasingly testy about Paul’s phobia about Covid, masks, and lack of concern about cooking. He’s taken up with divorced mom Carole (Nora Hamzawi) who is the only character here who doesn’t seem to do anything for a living, or anything interesting.

They’re “trapped” in this idyllic piece of French countryside, dining al fresco in the perpetual spring, doing Zoom meetings with filmmakers and production people and interviews with journalists or setting up a remote radio studio to host tribute shows to famous musicians Covid has killed (John Prine, etc.).

This may be “life interrupted,” but it’s not as if “time” is “Suspended.” The working folk maintain their status and careers, virus be damned.

Etienne is stressed, so his constant crepe-making is “therapeutic.” Paul’s “career” isn’t really missing a beat as his autobiographical narration about returning to his childhood home with his brother seems cinematic — with black and white flashbacks picking up on his college days, early loves.

The brothers serve up just a flash or two of sibling rivalry. And Paul mentions their “privilege,” as if that excuses them — between trips to the not-wholly-abandoned tennis court next door — of living large, their lives not missing a beat as they complain about the unmasked and fret over “exposure” to grocers.

The film may be commenting on the cushy way the rich and famous coped with Covid. But it’s insufferable at depicting insufferability.

Naturally the house is buried under the family’s books — especially the father’s hundreds of art history texts. Naturally the conversation veers towards appreciations of art, Paul’s fanboy obsession with David Hockney, as well as landmarks of French literature (“Abelard & Heloise”).

Naturally Morgane listens to a French radio rebroadcast of an interview with the famed filmmaker and son of a more famous painter Jean Renoir from 1958.

Because God forbid anybody there be so “common” as to sit down and say, watch and discuss what’s on television.

It’s a running gag in French cinema for export. Nobody watches TV in French films. Because by and large, the publishers, writers, filmmakers, designers and even TV chat show host characters of French cinema are too sophisticated to watch the tube. There are no TV sets to be seen. People talk and talk and talk, and naturally that talk drifts from pretentious to inane.

Paul even admits to referencing books he hasn’t read and films he hasn’t seen in an interview because of how sophisticated that makes him seem. What, he’s never heard the names “Mahler” and “Bergman” dropped in 34 Woody Allen movies?

So yes, the label “a Woody Allen dramedy without the laughs” works here and more firmly affixes itself to Assayas.

Because decades of Allen’s films were recreations of the sorts of French film characters, careers and conversations seen and heard in an airless, sexless and mostly romance-free bore of a movie that is, in this case at least, accurately titled — “Suspended Time.”

Rating: unrated, some subtitled profanity

Cast: Vincent Magaigne, Nine d’Urso, Mischa Lescot, Dominique Reymond, Maud Wyler and Nora Hamzawi

Credits: Scripted and directed by Olivier Assayas. A Music Box release.

Running time: 1:45